[Techtalk] /usr Partition

[Akkana Peck]

[ I advocated sharing a big /home, or at least data, partition among
several distros ]

Sue Stones writes:
> That's really useful to know.  Can home be shared between distros that 
> are based on debian, and those based on red hat?

That should generally work fine. The more dissimilar the distros are, the
greater chance that something (like gnome or mozilla) turns out to
have incompatibilities; but most packages these days don't have any
problem sharing. You'll probably see the most difficulty if one of
the distros is a lot older than the other (e.g. Debian experimental
and Redhat 9).

If you do discover a problem, you can solve it
by making that directory a symlink back to the root of each distro.

For instance, if Redhat uses evilprog v2.2 and Debian uses evilprog
v2.1, and evilprog complains when you go from one to the other
because of something in ~/.evilprog, you can do something like:

(as root)
mkdir /private (or call it anything you want)
mkdir /private/yourname
chown yourname /private/yourname

(as yourself)
mv .evilprog .evilprog.sav
cp -a ~/.evilprog.sav /private/yourname/.evilprog
ln -s /private/.evilprog ~

Then reboot into the other distro and do the same thing (except for
the mv .evilprog .evilprog.sav since that's already done).

Now each distro has its own private copie of .evilprog and they
won't collide.

	...Akkana